Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No.

9, 1789–1806, August 2004

Sexual Dissidence, Enterprise and Assimilation:

Bedfellows in Urban Regeneration

Alan Collins
[Paper first received, September 2003; in final form, February 2004]

Summary. This paper offers a pragmatic, principally economic perspective on the body of work
analysing the genesis and development of urban ‘gay villages’. The Soho Gay Village in central
London is presented as a case study. Its evolution and principal features are considered in the
light of the existing corpus of research into gay agglomerations and the documented experiences
of some other urban gay villages in England. It is suggested that, even with differing historical
roots and widely differing levels and forms of municipal support, a recurrent developmental
pattern seems to be discernible. This is characterised by an urban area in decline progressing
through several broad stages of economic enterprise denoted by: sexual and legal liminality; gay
male social and recreational opportunities; a widening service-sector business base; and, ulti-
mately, the assimilation of the area into the fashionable mainstream.

1. Introduction
There have been numerous contributions ex- prises and community within a city. These
pounding in social theoretical terms the link- spatial entities have been the subject of soci-
ages between sexuality or vice and urbanism ological, cultural, historical and geographical
(see—for example, Park and Burgess, 1925; scrutiny in North America, where some gay
Park, 1952; Castells, 1983; Knopp, villages have been discernible since at least
1994,1995; and Mort, 1996). This paper has the 1970s (Chauncey, 1995; Stryker and van
a much narrower focus and a different ana- Buskirk, 1996; Grube, 1997; Boyd, 2003), in
lytical framework. It adopts a pragmatic, continental Europe (Sibalis, 1999) and in
principally economic approach, drawing England (including, Quilley, 1997; Brown,
heavily on some of the logic of the ‘new 1997; Mort, 1998; Trumbach, 1999). In this
economic geography’ that has permeated paper, a principally economic case study of
contemporary economics. This study exam- the UK’s largest urban gay village in London
ines the 1980s and 1990s phenomenon of the is presented. Its evolution and development
emergence and development of the urban are considered with reference to the docu-
‘gay village’ in various cities across England. mented experiences of a number of other
The term ‘gay village’ possibly stems from significant (in terms of number of gay enter-
the earlier gay agglomeration present in prises) English urban gay villages. Retaining
Greenwich Village, New York, and describes this wholly English focus provides an albeit
a visible physical clustering of gay enter- imperfect means of controlling for some
Alan Collins is in the Department of Economics, Portsmouth Business School, University of Portsmouth, Richmond Building,
Portland Street, Portsmouth, PO1 3DE, UK. Fax: 02392 844 037. E-mail: alan.Collins@port.ac.uk. The author is grateful to
anonymous referees and Ronan Paddison for constructive comments, to all those who agreed to be interviewed for relaying their
valuable experiences and insights, to Bill Johnson for assistance with the map and also to Samuel Cameron, Stephen Drinkwater
and Derek Leslie for advice on specific technical matters. The usual caveat applies.
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/04/091789–18 © 2004 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080/0042098042000243156
1790 ALAN COLLINS
cross-cultural factors that may influence ur-
ban gay village development. In this limited
way, an attempt is made to identify any
commonalities and points of contrast in their
evolution and development.
In attempting to discern the key features of
the urban gay village phenomenon in Eng-
land, the paper necessarily reflects on the
reasons for their genesis in those particular
urban locations and the economic develop-
ment and urban planning issues that may
arise with regard to the future dynamics of
these areas and with regard to other nascent
or potential gay villages in other English
locations. Drawing on various bodies of evi-
dence, ranging from field visits, local histor-
ies, public health orientated surveys, local
authority documentation and a series of inter-
views with local planning officers across a
number of English cities and gay business
managers and entrepreneurs, arguments for
the existence of a seemingly recurrent model
of gay-led urban and economic regeneration
are advanced.
The paper is organised in the following
manner. In section 2, the theoretical argu-
ments advanced in connection with gay ag-
glomerations and gay villages are explored.
The following section presents a reference
case study of the gay village in London’s
Soho which extends into other parts of Lon-
don’s West End. In section 4, a simple model
is advanced of urban gay village develop-
ment. Concluding remarks are offered in the
final section.
2. Genesis and Development of Urban Gay
Villages: Theoretical Arguments
At a geographical scale of resolution some-
what broader than the sub-city level of urban
gay villages, accounting for why certain lo-
cations have an unusually large gay male or
lesbian community has been the subject of
recent research attention. For example, in the
context of the US, Murray (1996), amongst
others, highlights the notion that a key driver
of a gay male’s residential choice is the
nature of a city’s social and political views
towards gays. Accordingly, San Francisco,
California, is perceived as a city where being
gay is accepted and celebrated and thus is
home to a disproportionately large gay popu-
lation. Working from the perspective of pure
rational choice economics and using data
from the US census in 1990, Black et al.
(2002) sought to advance a simple economic
explanation, primarily to serve as the basis
for a model to predict the spatial distribution
of gay households across the US.1 In the
context of the San Francisco example, the
explanation proceeds as follows. The city is
physically one of the most attractive in the
US with a pleasant mild climate, a splendid
range of restaurants and a diverse and vibrant
arts and entertainment community. The city
thus forms a high-amenity location, where
valued amenities are capitalised into the he-
donic rent/property price gradient and/or
wage gradient—i.e. in equilibrium, house-
holds pay for these amenities via higher
property (rental) prices and maybe also lower
wages. Since gay households face constraints
that make bringing up children more costly
for them than ‘straight’ (heterosexual) house-
holds, this reduces their lifetime demand for
housing resources but frees up resources for
reallocation to more amenity-focused con-
sumption. Accordingly, Black et al. (2002)
show that gay men may be observed to sort
disproportionately into higher-amenity loca-
tions with further econometric evidence sug-
gesting that measures of local amenities
predict gay location choice more strongly
than measures of ‘gay friendliness’.2
In terms of an English focus, the thesis of
Black et al. (2002) could be seen as con-
tributing to a very plausible explanation as to
why the resort city of Brighton and Hove in
Sussex, on the south coast of England, with
its urban gay village of Kemptown, has de-
veloped as a leading gay magnet. Yet, it is
perhaps less useful in fully accounting for the
early genesis of urban gay villages in—for
example, Newcastle’s ‘pink triangle’ (Pubs-
Newcastle, 2003) or the Hurst Street area of
Birmingham (Marketing Birmingham, 2002).
Indeed, in the broader English context, it is
perhaps worth considering how comprehen-
sive and generalisable is such an explanation.
In the UK context it is, arguably, too heavily
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
reliant on high amenity-focused consump-
tion. Remaining broadly consistent with the
econometric work of Black et al. (2002), one
might still reasonably argue that high levels
of amenities are not an absolutely necessary
pre-requisite for high lesbian/gay population
densities, but their presence is certainly
likely to help facilitate the ‘take-off’, or race,
to a gay population critical mass. Once at-
tained, this is then sufficient to provide a
virtuous circle where high lesbian/gay house-
hold densities and/or gay commercial zones
become self-sustaining. They may be self-
sustaining because a gay population beyond
the critical threshold (a large concentration
of sexual like-mindedness) may be viewed as
offering high amenity value in its own right,
with club good characteristics (Buchanan,
1965). Arguably, the congestion limit for this
club good could be extremely high. Indeed, if
the gay population density rose to approach
100 per cent in the gay village, it is possible
that many gay men might not actually en-
counter a region of diminishing returns at all.
Such a ‘critical gay population size’ fo-
cused perspective might thus be more useful
in explaining—for example, the early genesis
of the Birmingham Gay Village centred
around Hurst Street, Birmingham, in Eng-
land. In contrast to the Castro Street area in
San Francisco, this gay village emerged in a
city at the heart of an urban-industrial conur-
bation, with an unremarkable but temperate
climate, and a decidedly inland, off-city-cen-
tre location. At the time, this location was
certainly not renowned for its aesthetic quali-
ties, or diverse range of amenities, of any
obvious particular appeal to lesbians and gay
men. The site of the gay village was a run-
down small craft and industrial factory/ware-
house district with some pubs and a few
shabby shop premises. Perhaps more simply,
as the main city of the UK Midlands conur-
bation, it had, and continues to have, a very
large population. Accordingly, it must there-
fore contain a large number of lesbian and
gay individuals/households. Arguably these
individuals/households had many leisure/re-
tail market needs that were relatively latent,
or to varying degrees suppressed, prior to the
1791
full emergence of the gay village. Gradually
over time and in the wake of a small existing
service-sector-based commercial foothold,
the benefits of relatively cheap premises and
land values could be exploited with addi-
tional injections of lesbian/gay-focused en-
trepreneurial effort. This has resulted in these
leisure/retail market needs being met more
directly by the 21 service-sector enterprises3
that currently give shape and focus to their
urban gay village, which also claims to be
the third-largest gay tourist destination in
England (Marketing Birmingham, 2002). In-
evitably, this widening service-sector base
and growing gay community profile has at-
tracted other, particularly Midlands-based,
lesbians and gay men (households and en-
trepreneurs) to live and work in the city, or at
least within a travel-to-leisure, or social com-
muting distance of it.
It is also a salient feature to note that,
while the econometric findings of Black et
al. (2002) provide a strong and convincing
body of evidence for why gay men now live
or aspire to live in San Francisco, they do not
help to explain why the location of San
Francisco developed as a gay magnet in the
first place, compared with some other ‘high
amenity’ US cities that did not. Black et al.
(2002) dismiss this as an ‘historical accident’
and sought to distinguish the economic argu-
ment from historical and sociological per-
spectives on individual gay residential
choices. Indeed, they cite the work of
D’Emilio (1989) in describing the triggering,
causal role of discharged gay US Navy
sailors based in the San Francisco area decid-
ing to remain living there.
In contrast to Black et al. (2002), this
study finds and considers an economic argu-
ment within these historical accidents, or se-
ries of historical accidents. Further, this
study also suggests that the economic dimen-
sion or economic significance of these his-
torical accidents helps the better tracing of a
path in the evolution of gay villages that may
be observed in the contemporary urban land-
scape of England. That there are significant
economic forces linked to such historical
accidents has been an emerging theme in the
1792 ALAN COLLINS
‘new economic geography’ that has entered
the corpus of contemporary economics. For
example, in a consideration of why Santa
Clara County in California has become a
favoured location for many firms in the mi-
croelectronics and software industries, Krug-
man notes that
like most such agglomerations, Silicon
Valley owes its existence to small histori-
cal accidents that, occurring at the right
time, set in motion a cumulative process of
self-reinforcing growth (Krugman, 1997,
p. 239).
Switching the focus back to gay residential
choice, one might thus contend that an initial
cluster or agglomeration of gay households
and gay amenities will naturally attract more
and more gay men. This cumulative self-re-
inforcing growth (inward migration) in-
evitably helps further to shape the emergence
of a spatial structure featuring urban gay
villages or districts.
Considering the development of urban gay
villages from the vantage-point of the new
economic geography, it is relatively easy to
translate its key pillars as identified by Krug-
man (1997), of path dependence, self-organ-
isation and discontinuous change, into
circumstances which would lead and shape
the development of gay districts in a particu-
lar location. Following the pure logic of
Schelling’s segregation model (Schelling,
1971, 1978), it may be observed that in terms
of path-dependence, individual microeco-
nomic or microsocial decisions such as the
opening of a gay-friendly bar or a gay night-
club in a particular city district, for whatever
reason (such as low rents, the opportunity of
vacant commercial premises in near-central
locations, entrepreneur’s personal taste), can
direct and help to shape the future course of
broader macrobehavioural outcomes. Such
outcomes might relate to the future residen-
tial locational clustering of gay men already
in the city and gay men migrating to the city.
In terms of self-organisation, lesbians and
gay men are not required to cluster and settle
around gay agglomerations of services. Yet
such relatively large-scale observed ordering
can be conceived of as the spontaneous over-
all outcome of a large number of free-market
atomistic interactions among gay and hetero-
sexual households. While one might suspect
fewer constraints to residential mobility
among gay men/households, such segre-
gation could conceivably also arise, in part,
from the preferences of some heterosexual
households to move to locations of more
uniformly heterosexual character.
Turning to discontinuous change, it is
reasonable to posit that, with the growth of
new urban sub-centres and with a constant or
increasing percentage of lesbian/gay male
households, there must exist a critical mass
(or in the language of Garreau, 1991, ‘a point
of spontaneous combustion’) at a particular
population/city size that is sufficient to foster
and sustain higher-order gay amenities such
as gay nightclubs, gay hotels, gay gyms and
gay sauna/health clubs. This causes ‘second-
ary explosions’ as businesses form or move
to the location (gay plumbers, gay carpen-
ters, gay cleaners, gay accountants, gay law
practices, etc.) to serve the gay businesses
and the large gay population already there.
Such critical mass economic behaviour could
be mathematically formalised in terms of the
standard economic base-multiplier model of
traditional regional science or regional econ-
omic analysis, but augmented with increas-
ing returns to scale (Pred, 1977).
Evidence for such ‘secondary explosions’
manifest in terms of the existence of gay
community-orientated enterprises, may be
readily found in the classified pages of the
national and local gay press (Pink Paper,
Gay Times, Boyz, QX, Gscene, etc.). It might
seem strange to a world of heterosexual con-
sumers why gay businesses or households
might prefer the services of an explicitly gay
plumber to one who is not explicitly gay. In
part, it may be gay community camaraderie,
but there are also more functional possible
reasons relating to deliberately minimising
the likelihood of encountering homophobic
behaviour, especially when inside gay-owned
homes/businesses. Further, it also assists in
minimising the effort associated with the
pressure to ‘de-gay’ homes or premises to
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION 1793

Table 1. Experiences of discrimination, abuse and violence against gay men in England (percentages)
(N ⫽ 14 632)

Experience in the past 12 months No Yes

Experienced discrimination while using bars and restaurants 93.3 6.7

Experienced discrimination while shopping 95.1 4.9
Experienced discrimination while dealing with tradespeople and business 95.4 4.6
services
Experienced discrimination with workmates and colleagues 86.6 13.4
Experienced discrimination with strangers in public 74.2 25.8
Experienced verbal abuse because of sexuality 65.7 34.3
Experienced physical attacks because of sexuality 92.9 7.1

Source: Sigma Research (2003).

make heterosexual persons more at ease. For
some geographers, these phenomena have
been described as examples of the intrusion
of heteropatriarchy, which they have ob-
served as characterising most social space,
even gay social space (Johnston and Valen-
tine, 1995; Bell, 1995; Kirby and Hay, 1997).
Evidence that there may be some rational,
self-defensive basis for such gay community
orientated business preferences, by gay men
in the UK, can be found in the National Gay
Men’s Sex Survey 2002 (Sigma Research,
2003). Selected results are presented in Table
1. They suggest that the scale of discrimi-
nation in ordinary commercial environments
is not trivial, although lower when they typi-
cally relate to such situations where it would
be difficult to discern homosexuality in the
course of a relatively swift transaction. This
might become more apparent in the home or
business environment of a gay man wary of
a stranger’s disposition to gay men (recalling
that 25.8 per cent of gay men had experi-
enced discrimination by strangers in public
in the past 12 months). It is certainly more
apparent for gay men where others have
much more time to discern sexuality, such as
in the work environment (where 13.4 per
cent of the sample had experienced discrimi-
nation in the past 12 months). The figures are
also relatively high for verbal abuse and
physical assault across England. Of course,
these figures do mask variations between
small county towns with isolated gay pubs or
club nights and larger urban gay villages in
more cosmopolitan cities, where assaults still
do take place, but where there can be a
greater sense of safety in numbers.
It is worth emphasising that the founding
gay amenities and the subsequent ‘secondary
explosions’ of gay community orientated
businesses are typically elements in a widen-
ing service-sector base. It is these services
that act as a magnet to gay households, since
they provide a means for helping to sustain
the defining features of an ‘out’ gay lifestyle.
The movement of (young) gay men to an
often-distant and large urban metropolis of-
fers greater scope for the more explicit ex-
ploration of their sexuality with virtually
complete anonymity if desired. In this en-
vironment, they are typically remote from the
social controls exerted by family and home
communities (Cameron and Collins, 2000).
This is important since part of the motivation
for such migration can be linked to the nature
and extent of social disapproval from their
domestic roots. Such migrants can easily dis-
cern and participate in the social and rec-
reational opportunities afforded by the
commercial centres of these gay village ar-
eas.
For a number of relatively mature urban
gay village areas, they could be said to have
thrived to such an extent that they have
become the chic social and cultural centres of
the city—the place to be seen, not just within
a loyal and relatively recession-resistant gay
customer base, but regardless of one’s sexual
preferences. Indeed, in the same manner as
1794 ALAN COLLINS
ethnically defined commercial enclaves or
zones (for example, Chinatown, Manchester
and London) provide all visitors and local
residents with option value and direct
benefits from a more diverse range of con-
sumption opportunities (retailing, entertain-
ment and gastronomy), gay villages clearly
do likewise. As examples, one may point to
the gay bars, clubs, shops and restaurants in
London’s Soho, Manchester’s Canal Street
and Brighton’s Kemptown. Their overall
customer base is not exclusively lesbian or
gay. In the context of Canal Street, in par-
ticular, it has been reported and voiced in the
gay community that the area is increasingly
becoming ‘too straight’. These concerns have
become so common and rehearsed that they
have even been featured in dramatic repre-
sentations of gay life in Manchester, such as
the Channel 4 television drama series Queer
as Folk. Canal Street has now become well
known as a safe zone for heterosexual
women to socialise in, such that heterosexual
men now also use this social space in pursuit
of heterosexual women. Inevitably, this
raises the amount of search effort required
for gay men and women to find potential
partners, since they increasingly now have to
filter out more heterosexual individuals from
the search pool, and also it may lead to some
changes in the sexual ambience and sense of
personal safety in the area (Whittle, 1994). In
this way, assimilation of gay social space
into the fashionable socio-sexual mainstream
advances, but may feature, along the way,
varying degrees of resentment from some
quarters of the gay community that would
prefer to retain more sexually exclusive so-
cial space.
3. Evolution of Soho Gay Village, London
While the ‘new economic geography’ can
provide a rationale for the emergence and
expansion of these gay agglomerations, it
does not describe the physical process of
urban change required to accommodate the
presence and evolving identity of a gay vil-
lage/district. Inevitably, the recent physical
evolution of recognisable urban gay villages
in the UK, as elsewhere, has become inter-
woven with debates raging over the process
of urban regeneration, renaissance and gen-
trification. For the case study area under
focus and various other principal English
urban gay villages (in Manchester, Brighton
and Birmingham), the open and visible
emergence of their clustering of gay service-
sector enterprises, even to the eyes of their
heterosexual populations (not just the les-
bian/gay cognoscenti), is uniformly a feature
of the 1980s and 1990s. To provide a more
nuanced account of Soho’s route, to what is
argued to be an ultimately convergent devel-
opment path with the other urban gay vil-
lages, some brief prefacing consideration of
its historical evolution is also presented.
Beginnings
Aside from its capital city status, London is
a world city such that its resident and visitor
population actually sustains a number of ma-
ture and nascent satellite gay clusters of ser-
vice-sector enterprises in the north, south,
east and west of London.4 During the course
of the 1970s and early 1980s, what could be
said to be the principal gay centre of London,
in terms of number of establishments, com-
prised a handful of fairly low-profile (in
mainstream heterosexual society terms) pubs
and clubs in the Earls Court area of West
London. The pre-eminence of this small clus-
tering was easily displaced during the course
of the mid 1980s and early 1990s, such that
central London’s Soho now reigns as the
largest gay cluster in the metropolis and the
UK. It is currently based around Old Comp-
ton Street (see Figure 1) but significantly
extends into surrounding streets and squares
and other parts of the ‘West End’ of central
London in walkable proximity, such as
Covent Garden and the Strand.
Given the long history of gay cultural and
sexual entertainment enterprises in London
since at least the late 17th century (Norton,
1992; Trumbach, 1999), it would seem un-
surprising if their were a continuous cluster-
ing or presence of gay enterprises in Soho till
the present day. However, there is no such
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION 1795

Figure 1. The Soho district, central London.

clear evidence for this. There may well have
been gay enterprises such as the infamous
‘molly houses’ in the area in the 18th cen-
tury, as there were many such establishments
spread across London.5 These were, how-
ever, closed down in various episodic moral
panics and clamp-downs (Norton, 1992). The
accepted wisdom that seems to emerge from
these historical investigations is that there
were probably more gay bars and gay broth-
els spread across London in the mid 18th
century than existed in the 1950s.
The area of Soho was hunting ground at
least from the middle ages through to the
1796 ALAN COLLINS
17th century, used by royalty and other aris-
tocrats.6 Following a perceived need to al-
leviate central London overcrowding and
provide safer, fairly central greenfield devel-
opment land in the aftermath of the Great
Fire of London in 1666, Soho was subjected
to rapid urban development. The lay-out of
streets and squares which, in the main, still
survive, was devised by Gregory King, an
eminent engraver, genealogist, statistician
and urban planner. The area still had some
cachet arising from its royal/aristocratic
hunting associations. Hence, it became a
fashionable residential district for the aristoc-
racy and wealthy in the 1670s and 1680s
(Summers, 1991; Hub Communications,
2003; Vinyl-Junkies, 2003). Given the area
had available space, and some large proper-
ties to accommodate craft industries, in the
early 18th century, Soho attracted consider-
able influxes of new settlers from continental
Europe. Many of these were refugees escap-
ing persecution, including Greeks (hence,
Greek Street in Soho) and French Huguenots
avoiding, respectively, Ottoman persecution
and Louis XIV’s reign. Predictably, these
influxes of refugees and craft industry led the
aristocrats and ‘old money’ wealthy, over
time, to leave Soho to seek out and establish
newly fashionable and exclusive residential
areas, such as Mayfair (Summers 1991). De-
spite the emergence of some nearby slum
housing, Soho became through the 18th and
19th centuries a thriving commercial centre
renowned over various times for its doctors,
lawyers’ practices, tailoring, artists (Farson,
1993) and the first London showroom of the
celebrated industrialist and ceramicist Josiah
Wedgwood (Summers, 1991; Vinyl-Junkies,
2003).
Sex, Soho and Culture
Alongside the thriving legitimate industry
also emerged the beginnings of the sex in-
dustry, which ultimately came to dominate
the actual and perceived popular character of
Soho from the late 1950s (Walford, 1987;
Farson, 1993) to the mid to late 1980s. The
earliest documented presence (in the early
18th century) relates to Hoopers Hotel
(known for heterosexual brothel services) on
Soho Square and also a continuous presence
of primarily street-based sex workers, right
through until the late 1950s (Farson, 1993;
Vinyl-Junkies, 2003). The 1959 Street Of-
fences Act, however, featured legislation to
curb soliciting for prostitution and introduced
serious penalties for so doing. Consequently,
the already significant stock of off-street
prostitution-related premises in nearby up-
per-floor flats began to increase further
through the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside this
came an increase in all the associated com-
mercial sex paraphernalia of red lights,
‘models’ business cards near ground-level
doorbells and telephone-booth postcard ad-
vertisements. Soho thus became the home to
numerous ‘clip joints’7 and illegal brothels,
whose ownership (often subject to bloody
gang turf wars) or ‘protection’ typically lay
with Italian and Maltese mafias and other
local criminal gangs.8 The area was generally
perceived through countless media and popu-
lar cultural images as seedy, shabby and
clouded in a haze of sexual and legal liminal-
ity. Riding on this sense of liminality (and
concomitant lower property prices/rents) in
the 1950s and 1960s, the area became a
magnet for a number of artistic or bohemian
individuals, who settled in Soho (Farson,
1993; Fryer, 1998). Hence, in due course, the
area also saw the beginnings of more bo-
hemian and avant-garde cultural enterprises
emerging. (Examples include Ronnie Scott’s
jazz club (Fordham, 1996) and Peter Cooke’s
“Establishment Club” (a satirical comedy
and revue club) (Thompson, 1997; Carpen-
ter, 2000).) The area had underground cul-
tural cachet which erupted via the popular
media in the 1960s into a significant, but
ultimately short-lived, musical, cultural and
fashion wave, centred around enterprises in
Carnaby Street in west Soho.
Further, following the media glare of Lon-
don’s Metropolitan Police Vice Squad and
Obscene Publications Squad corruption
charges (where many officers were found to
be running vice and porn protection rackets),
the revoking of many commercial licences in
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
the early to mid 1980s crackdown on the sex
and retail pornography industry and,
alongside, the beginnings of more private
and discreet sex-based e-commerce, there
was a major contraction in the number of
Soho commercial and residential premises
used by this sector.9 The area had declined
further until, in the mid 1980s, it was a
relatively run-down central urban area,
tainted with a long-standing reputation for
vice and crime and with its past glories from
its role in the 1960s London cultural van-
guard, fast fading in the public conscious-
ness.
Village People, Enterprise and Village Com-
munity
Of crucial importance for the emergence of
the Soho Gay Village, was the fact that there
was already a small presence of gay pubs (or
parts of pubs) in Soho itself and the ‘West
End’ of central London, serving its Theatre-
land.10 Thus, the development of this urban
gay village was not actually taking place on
a completely blank canvas. While Binnie
(1995) seems to consider the Soho Gay Vil-
lage to have actually emerged in 1991 with
the opening of the café bar called Village
Soho, this author disputes the historical
definitiveness of that assertion. There were
many earlier establishments existing in Soho
and the West End in the 1980s (not exclu-
sively centred on Old Compton Street as
now). While not collectively then branded
(commercially and informally) as a gay vil-
lage, nevertheless, they were already then
beginning to gel, through walkable proxim-
ity, into such a phenomenon.
From a very small existing commercial
foothold, substantial expansion could be
made, in large part, because it was con-
veniently helped by the contraction of the sex
and porn industry—a valuable historical ac-
cident in the Krugman (1997) sense. As more
commercial premises became available from
the mid 1980s and into the 1990s, more gay
service-sector enterprises became manifest
via a seemingly ad hoc, organic and gradu-
ally accelerating incremental process (as op-
1797
posed to area-based planned development
from the outset).
Gay entrepreneurs and households were
conveniently present at that time as an under-
exploited market niche, who were unlikely to
be deterred by the pervading social stigma of
living, operating businesses and providing a
customer base, in an area whose very name
at that time was dripping with connotations
of sexual illicitness and danger. Partly, this
could be explained in terms of the general
backdrop of liminality that was already a
feature of the lives of most lesbians and gay
men (before and even after decriminalisation
of homosexual activity between two consent-
ing adult males over 21 years of age in the
1967 Homosexual Law Reform Act). This
was especially so in the mid to late 1980s
where there was a heightened sense of lesbi-
ans and gay men in particular, being further
dispatched towards and beyond the margins
of social and sexual acceptability. It is im-
portant to recall that, at the time, the Con-
servative government of the UK was
pressing for more ‘traditional family values’
orientated policies, which militated against
gay lifestyles; pressurising local government
authorities (especially what were termed by
press and right-leaning politicians as ‘loony
left London boroughs’) to restrict or curtail
policies and schemes that treated lesbian/gay
households and lifestyles with equanimity
(the introduction of Section 28 in the 1988
Local Government Act being one example);
and, conveniently acquiescing in the wake of
the tabloid press whipped up hysteria that
recast the HIV/AIDS epidemic into the ‘gay
plague’.
The relevant local planning authority
(Westminster City Council) has never had
any special policy area status, formal or in-
formal, of any kind for a ‘gay village’. The
sobriquet ‘Soho Gay Village’ does not fea-
ture in any Westminster planning/local econ-
omic development documentation. That said,
there is some ambiguous reference in the
Pre-inquiry Unitary Development Plan of the
City of Westminster (dated 29 August 2002)
to the fact that Soho is a “vibrant and cosmo-
politan area” (p. 5). This may (and only
1798 ALAN COLLINS
may), in part, be suggestive of the presence
of a large cluster of gay enterprises and its
role as a focal point for the London gay
community.
Westminster Council’s seemingly more
ambivalent stance in this direction is some-
what surprising, given the gay village’s com-
mercial vitality, tourism significance and the
authority’s explicit recognition of ethnically
defined clusters. Based on detailed inspection
of available public documentation, it is read-
ily clear that the adjacent London ‘China-
town’, centred on Gerrard Street has
consistently attracted significant formal and
explicit attention from the Conservative
Party-led Westminster Council authority (for
example, Westminster City Council, 2002,
2003). It has even appointed a Chinese Com-
munity Liaison Officer to oversee matters
impacting on this community. Planning per-
mission and change-of-use matters (for legit-
imate businesses), helping the development
of the Soho Gay Village, however, do seem
to have been considered wholly on their indi-
vidual merits, but irrespective of their poten-
tial consistency with, and contribution to,
any gay village identity.
These gay enterprises continue to provide
services principally geared to supporting gay
male social and recreational activities, in-
cluding: gay pubs/bars (typically gay-run but
not necessarily gay-owned, as breweries
rightly appreciated the potential of the grow-
ing gay market), cafés, restaurants, fetish-
wear retailers, gay accessory stores,
nightclubs, gyms, saunas (in premises on the
margins of Covent Garden), gay escorts (us-
ing rented central Soho apartments) and
other gay-focused businesses and pro-
fessional practices. They have emerged to
trade in close proximity and shape the widen-
ing service-sector base that characterises the
commercial foundations of the contemporary
Soho Gay Village. In terms of scale, from a
schedule of personal visits and using the
address and postcode information in the Gay
to Z Directory (Issue 12, 2003) (cross-refer-
encing with other London free gay publica-
tions further to corroborate and discern
explicit gay focus or ownership), it was cal-
culated that, in August 2003, only taking into
account explicitly gay nightclub venues, gay
pubs/bars and gay cafés/restaurants in the
Soho Gay Village (including some adjacent
streets/squares), 56 such enterprises could be
found in short walking distance of each
other.
The increasing trading vitality and aes-
thetic improvements, linked to the develop-
ment of an urban gay village in such a central
London location, has of course meant that it
has formed part of the spectrum of leisure
options for all London residents and visitors.
Witnessing its success with both gay and
straight consumers, the Soho Gay Village has
laid the foundations for the secondary growth
of a large number of other bars/cafés/restau-
rants in its wake, that are not gay-run or
gay-owned and which are targeted princi-
pally towards more homosexuality-tolerant,
fashionable young singles, or just the main-
stream heterosexual market.
While there has always been a sizeable,
principally apartment dwelling, residential
community in Soho, throughout the course of
the 19th and 20th centuries, the construction
of an increasingly stronger gay presence and
identity did lead to a 1980s and 1990s influx
of gay households in Soho. Understandably,
this could not be sustainable unless gay
households rarely moved and never sold their
property to non-gay households, or the
highest bidder irrespective of sexuality. As a
fashionable central London location of po-
tential interest to all, regardless of sexuality,
and with several gated and secure new resi-
dential developments emerging to capitalise
on its location and fashionable lifestyle desir-
ability, property prices and rentals have in-
creased markedly, even by London
standards. This ensures income and wealth
now ultimately conditions the dynamics of
the contemporary residential character of
Soho and presents constraints on the lesbian/
gay residential population density. This is not
to say that the Soho Gay Village is ultimately
likely to be displaced as the principal gay
cluster in London and the UK. It is not, since
the presence of upwards of 56 gay enter-
prises demonstrates clearly it has never really
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
relied on just Soho residents (estimated to
comprise approximately 6000 individuals
(Soho Society, 2001) as its significant cus-
tomer base. It has long been reliant on the
wider London gay population, since Lon-
doners enjoy an extensive travel-to-leisure
area facilitated by London’s dense tube, train
and bus network.
For some geographers, the urban renais-
sance of the Soho area, alongside the munici-
pal and police actions to induce contraction
of the sex industry, provides indicative evi-
dence of a ‘revanchist’ (Smith, 1996) city
agenda (Hubbard, 2004). By this is meant a
process of urban change, whereby a White
(heterosexual) middle-class ‘conspiracy’ sup-
ported by municipal political power and con-
siderable capital resources, literally ‘takes
revenge’ and reappropriates urban space
back into the White middle-class (heterosex-
ual) sphere of interest.11 Even ignoring the
role of e-commerce, as a booming substitute
channel, in the spatial diminution of the com-
mercial sex and porn industry, such an argu-
ment neglects the fact that the engine of this
renaissance was not a direct municipally sup-
ported initiative and was not entirely re-
sourced in its early genesis with wider
middle-class society’s capital. It is true that
there was and continues to be, concerted
action by Westminster Council and the
Metropolitan Police to constrain through
planning, licensing and law enforcement, the
physical extent of the sex and porn industry
(Hubbard, 2004). Yet for this author, its
significant displacement by a large number
of gay service-sector enterprises could not
credibly be argued to be the preferred end-
game outcome of such a White middle-class
heterosexual conspiracy. The essence of this
somewhat tortuous argument seems to be
based on a view that the gay community
were tacitly allowed to serve as the means of
urban renaissance. Continuing in this con-
spiratorial vein, they would serve to provide
revalorised and better-quality social and
commercial inner urban space, for the ulti-
mate benefit of White heterosexual middle-
class society, who would eventually
reacquire such space (by dint of their power
1799
and capital over time). It is true that the
residential character of London’s Soho is
likely to have changed as prices/rents have
risen. There may well be fewer lesbian/gay
households now than in the late 1980s or
early 1990s, as the wider desirability of the
now-fashionable Soho area has added its
force to the housing market. Yet, in terms of
the commercial landscape, there seems to be
a large, dynamic and sustainable body of gay
service-sector enterprises that are likely to
dominate the area for the foreseeable future.
In the light of the outcome that is the Soho
Gay Village, perhaps the urban renaissance
process could more accurately be described
as the harnessing of the convenient presence
of essentially class-blind, ethnicity-blind, but
gay-sourced capital and entrepreneurial ef-
fort, of sufficient scale to be able to exploit
the commercial space made available by the
diminishing physical presence of the sex and
porn industry. The feature of London’s gay
managed capital and entrepreneurial effort
driving an urban renaissance process, at least
in the early stages, seems to be more consist-
ent with an interpretation of Lees’ (2000)
emancipatory city thesis. This suggests a par-
ticular path of urban regeneration and renais-
sance. In essence, it could be characterised as
a process whereby people become united in
the central area of a city and create opportu-
nities for recreational/social interaction, eth-
nic and sexual tolerance and cultural
diversity. This seems a neat encapsulation of
the essential character of Soho Gay Village,
since it resolutely presents itself as physi-
cally gay space (even in the midst of munici-
pal disinterest), but also as part of an array of
leisure consumption options, for the benefit
of the wider urban liberal society of London
and not just its lesbians and gay men.
4. Towards a Simple Model of the Evol-
ution of Urban Gay Villages in England
In Quilley (1997) a brief insight into gay life
in Manchester before the Gay Village pref-
aces a detailed politico-economic exposition
of its emergence in the 1980s. In the
Brighton Ourstory Project (BOP) (2001) a
1800 ALAN COLLINS
more straightforward historical narrative is
unfolded. Yet what is clear is that, in com-
mon with London, what really constituted the
physical presence of pre-gay village life in
these places were a small number of pubs
across the city. Brighton and Hove had gay
pubs known by the lesbian and gay
cognoscenti, (including military personnel
stationed at the local garrison and also the
naval port of Portsmouth along the coast)
even in the 1930s (BOP 2001). Additionally
in Brighton, given its seaside holiday orien-
tation, a wider gay-orientated service-sector
base could be identified far earlier than in
most other English towns or cities. Even in
pre-gay village days, a number of hotels or
bed and breakfasts (BandBs) were known
through an informal network (functioning by
largely by word of mouth) to be places where
lesbian and gay couples could stay with no
‘awkward’ questions (BOP 2001). Yet none
of these enterprises was in a close physical
clustering—perhaps because this would be
more likely to draw attention to their then
strictly illegal status in supporting homosex-
ual activities and lifestyles. These enterprises
were thinly spread across Brighton and
Hove, but included some premises within the
current Brighton gay village area of Kemp-
town, centred on St James Street (BOP,
2001).
Quilley (1997) also draws attention to the
former status of the Canal Street environs,
the centre of the Manchester Gay Village, as
a marginal area, featuring red-light activities
and ‘skid row’ or renewal-needy characteris-
tics. Turning to Brighton, this south coast
resort has long had echoes and associations
with sexual and legal liminality, even since
the Regency era. It was well known as a
place for conducting illicit affairs and for its
extensive smuggling operations. A pioneer-
ing early contribution to the image of sexual
frisson and peccadilloes, connoted by week-
ends in Brighton, was made by the Prince
Regent who ‘kept’ a number of mistresses
there (Barlow, 1997; Fines, 2002). Brighton
was also the home to a number of secret
tunnels in the service of smuggling opera-
tions and had a reputation for hosting a size-
able criminal fraternity since at least the
interwar period. The latter was given the
oxygen of publicity by the publication of
Graham Greene’s 1938 novel and subsequent
film adaptation, Brighton Rock, which actu-
ally further stimulated tourism demand
(Fines 2002). Accordingly, as with Soho, all
these characteristics help to paint a picture of
these locations being enmeshed to varying
extents in a mist of sexual and legal liminal-
ity, but discreetly and gradually presenting a
more homosexually open presence. This was
done principally through the semi-public
meeting venues provided by ‘pub’ environ-
ments. This marginal area/twilight character
coupled with an initial pub focus is also
readily identifiable in the development of
several other such gay villages in England,
including those in Birmingham and New-
castle.
The reality of the decriminalisation of
homosexual activity between consenting
males in 1967 seemed to take some time to
become established, with regard to the fuller
range of commercial opportunities this would
allow. During the mid to late 1970s in parts
of London, and in Brighton, Manchester and
Newcastle, small clusters of such pubs did
emerge, although not necessarily fully visible
to mainstream society in these locations. It
was within these clusters that the beginnings
of a widening of the service-sector base
could eventually be discerned. Aside from
Brighton’s early ‘gay-friendly’ small hotels
and BandBs, there emerged from the mid–
late 1970s at all these locations a presence of
one or two gay nightclubs, possibly a gay
sauna and, for some, a gay-orientated sex/
clothing accessories store. Cafés, gay trades-
persons and professional practices explicitly
operating in the locale, typically followed in
the secondary wave of enterprises during the
course of the 1980s and early 1990s and the
drive to a readily identifiable gay village
identity.
It is possible to note a key feature, apart
from its ultimate scale, which does dis-
tinguish London’s Soho from most other En-
glish gay villages. At no point during the
course of its evolution was there any explicit
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
municipal support given to the formation of a
gay village identity. This neglect or under-
playing of its identity markedly contrasts
with the situation in several other UK cities
with gay villages (Manchester, Birmingham,
Brighton). Birmingham and Manchester both
have explicit project elements in their devel-
opment plans for what they explicitly refer to
as ‘the gay village’ including, land redevel-
opment, installation of CCTV to increase the
sense of safety in this space, pedestrianisa-
tion schemes and various other urban en-
vironmental amenity improvements.
Newcastle has explicit references to investi-
gating the development needs and potential
of ‘the gay village’ in its City Centre Action
Plan (Newcastle City Council, 2002a, p. 36)
but has not hitherto fleshed out any detailed
development plans featuring a gay village
identity. The rapid development towards
what is now a slightly more visible gay
village (the ‘pink triangle’) in Newcastle, is
thus, in large part, attributable to a proactive
stance adopted by a small group of senior
members of its planning department and the
relevant licensing magistrates. In the light of
a real background political will to foster
equality (as now formally enunciated in The
Newcastle Plan—A Community Strategy for
the City (Newcastle City Council, 2002b),
these parties met in 1999 with a view to
removing obstacles to a gay clustering of
service-sector establishments. The intention
was primarily to improve the quality of so-
cial and recreational provision for a then
underprovided for, lesbian/gay population.
These problems were generated by an inad-
equate number of liquor licences in the city.
The alleviation of this specific constraint, by
municipal and regulatory authorities, directly
facilitated and accelerated its expanding gay
service-sector base. Further, Manchester and
Brighton also maintain a number of munici-
pal forums where lesbian and gay residents’
issues can be discussed and they also feature
a significant number of ‘out’ lesbian and gay
local councillors.
For Quilley, the very development process
culminating in Manchester’s Gay Village
was also intimately bound up with the chang-
1801
ing agendas of the municipal urban left. He
suggests that, from a policy centrepiece of
resistance to Thatcherite policies, the idea of
a gay village evolved to become harnessed
explicitly within a property-led redevelop-
ment strategy. In such a strategy
the aesthetic of the gay scene has become
articulated into a wider re-imaging of the
city around the familiar theme of Eu-
ropean style cafés, pedestrian streets, and
arcades, as well as around a central role
for leisure and cultural activities (Quilley,
1997, p. 275).
Remarkably then, even in the absence of a
sympathetic or proactive municipal (politi-
cal) advocate or patron, a similar physical
outcome could also be said to characterise
the contemporary commercial face of Lon-
don’s Soho Gay Village.
In distilling these experiences and
findings, it seems reasonable to posit a sim-
ple developmental model of the evolution of
urban gay villages in England. It is con-
tended that the progression through these
stages may be accelerated by direct munici-
pal support (planning and/or licensing) and
high amenity attributes in a location (follow-
ing Black et al., 2002), but neither of these
elements is considered to be a sufficient and
necessary condition. Of crucial importance,
however, for a sustainable urban gay village
is the eventual attainment of a gay critical
mass population to serve as the customer
base, within the travel-to-leisure area. Essen-
tially, this developmental model describes a
number of characteristic phases in the evol-
ution of an urban gay village as presented in
Table 2. Stage 1 describes the pre-conditions
for an urban area typically apparent in a
number of eventual gay village locations.
The critical presence of licensed premises/
pubs for the evolution of English gay villages
is readily apparent in viewing the pro-
gression from stages 1 to 3. Clearly, an inad-
equate stock of liquor licences or a
reluctance to issue supplementary licences
could easily retard the pace of development
to urban gay village status. Relatively few
1802 ALAN COLLINS

Table 2. Stages in the development of urban gay villages in England

Stage 1: ‘Pre-conditions’—urban area in decline: location of sexual and legal liminal activities and
behaviour
Key features
1. Twilight/marginal area showing extensive physical urban decay
2. Presence of street-based and/or near off-street (predominantly heterosexual) prostitution
3. Significant stock of vacant commercial premises
4. Low property prices/rental values
5. Typical presence of at least one gay licenced public house

Stage 2: ‘Emergence’—clustering of gay male social and recreational opportunities

Key features
1. Conversion of some other nearby licensed public houses into ‘gay run’ pubs
2. Increase in applications made for liquor licences to support conversion of some other existing
commercial premises into gay nightclub or additional licensed public houses
3. Upgrading or renovation of existing gay pub(s) in the area
4. Substantial increase in gay male customer base and pub revenue stream

Stage 3: ‘Expansion and diversification’—widening gay enterprise service-sector base

Key features
1. Conversion of some other existing commercial premises for gay service-sector enterprises: gay
health clubs/saunas, gay retail lifestyle accessory stores, gay café-bars
2. Further applications for liquor licences and planning permission for additional gay nightclubs
3. Increasing gay household density in the existing stock of residential units in the gay village locale
4. Increasing physical visibility and public awareness of the urban gay village to mainstream society
5. Growth of gay tradespersons and professional practices operating in or near the gay village, or
via its community media
6. Increasingly significant and sustained contribution to the gay service-sector enterprises’ revenue
streams from visiting gay tourists

Stage 4: ‘Integration’—assimilation into the fashionable mainstream

Key features
1. Increasing presence of heterosexual custom in ostensibly gay pubs/bars
2. Conversion of some existing commercial premises for new mainstream society service-sector
enterprises (bars, clubs, restaurants)
3. Influx of young urban professionals to the existing stock of residential units in the gay village
environs
4. Outflow and suburbanisation of early gay residential colonisers
5. Increasing applications and construction of new-build (apartment) residential units in the gay
village environs
6. Increasingly significant and sustained contribution to gay service-sector enterprises’ revenue
streams from the heterosexual community

such gay villages could currently be argued
to have fully achieved progression through to
assimilation into the fashionable mainstream
as described in stage 4. One might include
Manchester Gay Village, London’s Soho and
arguably Kemptown, Brighton, in this cate-
gory, but this grouping seems likely to in-
crease in number over time.
Looking to the future, as new urban gay
villages do emerge over time, it is possible
that, in market terms, real competition is
generated amongst them for lesbian/gay cus-
tom and in terms of lesbian/gay residential
attractiveness. In such a situation, it is plaus-
ible to envisage a situation where some urban
gay villages will enter a declining phase and
revert from villages back to lower-level dis-
tricts or clusters. It may be that the result is
a long-run equilibrium consisting of a rela-
tively small group of large urban gay vil-
lages, towards which lesbians and gay men
gravitate (subject to income and job con-
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
straints) and a larger number of smaller gay
districts and clusters.
5. Concluding Remarks
This paper has explored the generic concept
of the urban gay village in England, in terms
of the reasons for their location and their
evolutionary paths. A case study of the
largest such urban gay village in England is
presented and its characteristics and develop-
ment path considered. This is unfolded in the
light of the documented experiences of other
significant English urban gay villages. De-
spite differing experiences of municipal sup-
port for such entities, a recurrent model of
their development seems discernible. Typi-
cally from within a marginal or twilight area,
a foothold, comprising the presence of one or
more gay-run licensed premises (pubs), may
attract additional pubs and eventually a wider
range of gay service-sector enterprises, ex-
ploiting the existence of adjacent or nearby
vacant and low-value space.
Further economic case studies elsewhere,
such as in other nascent urban gay villages in
England and in other countries, might use-
fully be undertaken to confirm the validity
and level of generalisation possible with this
simple model. It may offer an initial analyti-
cal framework, or can provide some broad-
level insight, to inform local economic
development and planning strategy. It seems
that the harnessing of the gay village concept
in these domains is likely to be feasible, with
a shorter and more definitive time-scale,
where there is a genuine willingness by mu-
nicipal authorities to support lesbian and gay
communities and where this is maintained
alongside the practical desire to realise more
swiftly their potential, in enhancing the com-
mercial vitality and physical regeneration of
particular urban areas. The experience of
London’s Soho Gay Village shows, however,
given the appropriate favourable pre-condi-
tions and the absence of actively repressive
constraints (for example, ample liquor li-
cences, fair and objective assessments in
planning permission requests) such entities
1803
may evolve anyway, even in the face of
municipal political ambivalence.
Notes
1. Black et al. (2002) in part account for differ-
ences between lesbian and gay male residen-
tial choice by virtue of the fact that they
observe lesbian households are more likely
to have children, so that (they argue) many
lesbians are more likely to prefer smaller
towns.
2. Albeit with some systematic error, to permit
identification of lesbian and gay households,
the 1990 US census long form asked ques-
tions which can reveal single never-married
households without children (by age and
gender) and explicit questions relating to
same-sex unmarried partner status for other
residents in the home. It is this latter cate-
gory of ‘gay couples’ that Black et al. (2002)
focus on in their study. In the past, the US
census form only gave the choice of husband
and wife for partner status. From the individ-
ual and aggregate data in the 2001 UK cen-
sus, one can readily identify single
never-married households without children
by gender through various age-bands and
same-sex households (i.e. not same-sex un-
married partners). That said, this might be-
come possible, to some extent, with the soon
to be released household micro data from the
UK 2001 census. The current difference be-
tween the US and UK individual and aggre-
gate census data generates, in
statistical/econometric terms, some serious
problems, since the definition of same-sex
households provides a very ‘noisy signal’
(and probably a substantial overestimate) of
lesbian/gay household status. This is clearly
the case because same-sex households need
not be lesbian or gay at all. Further, there are
also mixed sexual orientation households
which must go unrecognised (in fact, are
systematically completely neglected) in both
the US and UK census. In principle, it may
be possible that future UK-based work could
corroborate the proportions (or at least pro-
vide a lower bound estimate) of lesbian/gay
households or partly lesbian/gay households,
from the UK Census cohort of same-sex
households. This could be done by grossing
up the proportions from some other large-
scale survey that actually does consider sex-
ual identity or preferences—for example, the
UK 2000–2001 National Survey of Sexual
Attitudes and Lifestyles soon to be available
from the ESRC Data Archive at the Univer-
sity of Essex, England.
1804 ALAN COLLINS
3. Author’s count from B1 Community (Issue
No. 1, May 2003)—a free news and listings
publication for the lesbian and gay com-
munity in Birmingham, England.
4. These include clusters based around
Clapham Common High Street (south), Earls
Court/Brompton Road (west), Camden Town
and Islington (north) Commercial Road and
Bethnal Green (east).
5. ‘Molly houses’ were a kind of combined gay
bar, cabaret, social club and brothel featuring
some cross-dressing behaviour.
6. The name Soho comes from the then-popular
hunting cry ‘so-ho’ to rally the hounds when
in pursuit of quarry.
7. The term ‘clip joint’ refers to places where
men were fleeced out of their money by
being enticed to pay large sums for drinks
and often ultimately non-existent sexual en-
tertainment by women working at the estab-
lishment. Those unwilling to pay had to face
the prospect and visible threat of confron-
tation with the clip joint’s hired thugs.
8. Recent investigations suggest that Albanian
gangs currently dominate the more scaled-
down and volatile (in terms of entry/exit
rates) brothel scene. It has been suggested
that this has been achieved by either employ-
ing or enslaving eastern European women to
undercut the sex tariff prices of already-resi-
dent sex workers (Coward, 2003). This
volatility is reported to be largely a conse-
quence of the more sustained and aggressive
action by the local authority and police to
search out and close such brothels in Soho.
Yet often, once closed down they were found
to re-open quickly in different premises,
staying in business there until detected again.
That said, the motivation and action of the
authorities are the subject of considerable
contention by some sex workers (Silverman,
2003).
9. One estimate considers the industry contrac-
ted to a sixth of its former hey-day size in the
early 1980s (Vinyl-Junkies, 2003).
10. These included The Golden Lion in Dean
Street, Soho, which was apparently popular
with gay servicemen and, recalling an even
earlier era, The Salisbury in Upper St Mar-
tins Lane, where it is reputed that Oscar
Wilde and his entourage visited from time to
time.
11. Castells (1983) and Lauria and Knopp
(1985) in the context of gentrified residential
areas in the US, however, assert that there
may be observed a homosexualisation of
such areas by dominant interests and gays,
both comprising mainly White middle-class
men. In the course of this particular study, no
obvious class bias was detected in the com-
mercial presence, orientation and customer
base of the Soho Gay Village.
References
BARLOW, A. (1997) The Prince and his Pleasures.
Brighton: The Royal Pavillions Libraries and
Museums.
BELL, D. (1995) Perverse dynamics, sexual citi-
zenship, and the transformation of intimacy, in:
D. BELL and G. VALENTINE (Eds) Mapping De-
sire: Geographies of Sexualities, pp. 304–317.
London: Routledge.
BINNIE, J. (1995) Trading places: consumption,
sexuality and the production of queer space, in:
D. BELL and G. VALENTINE (Eds) Mapping De-
sire: Geographies of Sexualities, pp. 182–199.
London: Routledge.
BLACK, D., GATES, G., SANDERS, S. and TAYLOR,
L. (2002) Why do gay men live in San Fran-
cisco? Journal of Urban Economics, 51(1),
pp. 54–76.
BOYD, N. A. (2003) Wide Open Town: A History
of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
BRIGHTON OURSTORY PROJECT (2001) A history of
Brighton’s lesbian and gay community (http://
brightonourstory.co.uk; accessed August 2003).
BROWN, J. (1997) The lesbian and gay communi-
ties in the built environment – a planning obli-
gation. Working Paper No. 41, Centre for
Research into European Urban Environments,
Department of Town and Country Planning,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
BUCHANAN, J. (1965) An economic theory of
clubs, Economica 32, pp. 1–14.
CAMERON, S. and COLLINS, A. (2000) Playing the
Love Market: Dating, Romance and the Real
World. London: Free Association Press.
CARPENTER, H. (2000) That Was Satire That Was:
The Satire Boom of the 1960s. London: Victor
Gollancz.
CASTELLS, M (1983) The City and the Grassroots.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
CHAUNCEY, G. (1995) Gay New York: Gender,
Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.
COWARD, R. (2003) Slaves in Soho, The Guard-
ian, 26 March (http://guardian.co.uk/comment/
story/0,3604,921977,00.html; accessed 15
August 2003).
D’EMILIO, J. (1989) Gay politics and community
in San Francisco since World War II, in: M. B.
DUBERMAN (Ed.) Hidden from History: Re-
claiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, pp. 456–
473. New York: NAL Books.
FARSON, D. (1993) Soho in the Fifties. London:
Pimlico.
 SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, ENTERPRISE AND ASSIMILATION
FINES, K. (2002) A History of Brighton and Hove.
Chichester: Phillimore.
FORDHAM, J. (1996) Jazz Man: The Amazing Story
of Ronnie Scott and his Club. London: Trafal-
gar Square.
FRYER, J. (1998) Soho in the Fifties and Sixties.
London: National Portrait Gallery Publications.
GARREAU, J. (1991) Edge City: Life on the New
Frontier. New York: Doubleday.
GRUBE, J. (1997) ‘No more shit’: the struggle for
democratic gay space in Toronto, in: G. B.
INGRAM, A.-M. BOUTHILLETTE and Y. RETTER
(Eds) Queers in Space: Communities, Public
Spaces, Sites of Resistance, pp. 127–145. Seat-
tle: Bay Press.
HUBBARD, P. (2004) Cleansing the metropolis?
Urban prostitution and the politics of zero toler-
ance, Urban Studies, 41(9), pp. 1687–1702.
HUB COMMUNICATIONS (2003) Soho (http://
www.hubcom.com/channel/soho/history.htm;
accessed 15 August 2003).
JOHNSTON, L. and VALENTINE, G. (1995) Wherever
I lay my girlfriend, that’s my home: the per-
formance and surveillance of lesbian identities
in domestic environments, in: D. BELL and G.
VALENTINE (Eds) Mapping Desire: Geogra-
phies of Sexualities, pp. 99–113. London: Rout-
ledge.
KIRBY, S. and HAY, I. (1997) (Hetero)sexing
Space: Gay Men and ‘Straight Space’ in Ade-
laide, South Australia. Professional Geogra-
pher, 49(3), pp. 295–305.
KNOPP, L. (1994) Social justice, sexuality and the
city, Urban Geography, 15(7), pp. 644–660.
KNOPP, L. (1995) Sexuality and urban space: a
framework for analysis, In: D. BELL and G.
VALENTINE (Eds) Mapping Desire: Geogra-
phies of Sexualities, pp. 149–161. London and
New York: Routledge.
KRUGMAN, P. (1997) How the economy organizes
itself in space: a survey of the new economic
geography, in: W. B. ARTHUR, S. DURLAUF and
D. A. LANE (Eds) The Economy as an Evolving
Complex System II: Proceedings, pp. 223–237.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press..
LAURIA, M. and KNOPP, L. (1985) Towards an
analysis of the role of gay communities in the
urban renaissance, Urban Geography, 6,
pp. 152–169.
LEES, L. (2000) A re-appraisal of gentrification:
towards a geography of gentrification, Progress
in Human Geography, 24(3), pp. 389–408.
MARKETING BIRMINGHAM (2002) Gay Birmingham
(http://www.birmingham.org.uk/nightlife/
gay birmingham.php; accessed 15 August
2003).
MORT, F. (1996) Cultures of Consumption: Com-
merce, Masculinities and Social Space. Lon-
don: Routledge.
MORT, F. (1998) Cityscapes: consumption, mas-
culinities and the mapping of London since
1805
1950, Urban Studies, 35(5/6), pp. 889–907.
MURRAY, S. (1996) American Gay. Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press.
NEWCASTLE CITY COUNCIL (2002a) City centre
action plan (http://www.newcastle.gov.uk).
NEWCASTLE CITY COUNCIL (2002b) The Newcastle
plan: a community strategy for the city (http://
www.newcastle.gov.uk).
NORTON, R. (1992) Mother Clap’s Molly House:
The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830.
London: Gay Men’s Press.
PARK, R. E. (1952) Human Communities: The City
and Human Ecology. Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press.
PARK, R. E. and BURGESS, E. W. (1925) The City.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
PRED, A. (1977) City-systems in Advanced Econ-
omies. London: Hutchinson.
PUBSNEWCASTLE (2003) Pink triangle/gay village
(http://www.weir86.freeserve.co.uk/GayVil-
lage.html; accessed 15 August 2003).
QUILLEY, S. (1997) Constructing Manchester’s
‘new urban village’: gay space in the en-
trepreneurial city, in: G. B. INGRAM, A.-M.
BOUTHILLETTE and Y. RETTER (Eds) Queers in
Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of
Resistance, pp. 275–292. Seattle: Bay Press.
SCHELLING, T. C. (1971) Dynamic models of seg-
regation, Journal of Mathematical Sociology,
1(2), pp. 143–186.
SCHELLING, T. C. (1978) Micromotives and Mac-
robehaviour. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
SIBALIS, M. (1999) Paris, in: D. HIGGS (Ed.) Queer
Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600, pp. 10–
37. London: Routledge.
SIGMA RESEARCH (2003) Vital Statistics 2002: En-
glish Strategic Health Authorities Data Report:
Findings from the National Gay Men’s Sex
Survey 2002. London: Sigma Research (http://
www.sigmaresearch.org.uk).
SILVERMAN, J. (2003) Sex workers say ‘let us
stay’. BBC News, 18 February (http://
news.bbc.co.uk/hi/uk/2754019.stm; accessed
15 August 2003)
SMITH, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gen-
trification and the Revanchist City. London:
Routledge.
SOHO SOCIETY (2001) Soho present (http://
www.thesohosociety.org.uk; accessed 15 Au-
gust 2003).
STRYKER, S. and BUSKIRK, J. VAN (1996) Gay by
the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San
Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco, CA:
Chronicle Books.
SUMMERS, J. (1991) Soho. London: Bloomsbury.
THOMPSON, H. (1997) Peter Cook: A Biography.
London: Hodder & Stoughton.
TRUMBACH, R. (1999) London, in: D. HIGGS
Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600,
pp. 89–111. London: Routledge.
1806 ALAN COLLINS
VINYL-JUNKIES (2003) Soho (http://www.vinyl-
junkies.com/soho.html; accessed 15 August
2003).
WALFORD, E. (1987) Old London: Strand to Soho.
London: Alderman Press.
WESTMINSTER CITY COUNCIL (2002) Draft Pre-in-
quiry unitary development plan, 29 August,
City of Westminster Council, London (http://
www.westminster.gov.uk).
WESTMINSTER CITY COUNCIL (2003) Draft action
plan for Chinatown May 2003. City of West-
minster Council, London. (http://www.
westminster.gov.uk).
WHITTLE, S. (1994) Consuming differences: the
collaboration of the gay body with the cultural
state, in: S. WHITTLE (ed.) The Margins of the
City: Gay Men’s Urban Lives, pp. 27–41.
Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.